Jordan Well

Prof, What's the difference between your photo and Neil's on 94? I think the photo is a little later than morning, fires were still raging until later in the day - even Sat morning it had the smell of smoke, of burnt wood ash. The furious calm of Saturday morning when all the fires were out, the feeling that the earth had dwindled, the shaking of my father's head, but to witness all this sad destruction in daylight was hard to believe, and the puzzled look on faces asking "Can this possibly be true?" And I grew up in a hurry. This would have been the view the King saw long before he was shown the Cathedral. The cinema (Gaumont) had been hit, killing three people.

Ah, well noticed Kaga - the photos in posts 94 & 105 on the previous page are indeed the exact same photo - same people standing in the same positions! I hadn't noticed that before.

Does anybody know the origins of 'Jordan' and his/her well?

It was constructed in 1346 the then Mayor Mr Jordan Shepy constructed "Jordan Well" which was called after him. It was repaired at great cost in 1540. In 1698 the well was considered dangerous, it had a great wheel for drawing the water with two buckets attached. It was then covered over and a pump was set down it. Some years before this Mr Robert Bedford had bought a house in Jordan Well, pulled it down and re-erected it so the front was so far back from the street that it left a well belonging to him in the street which had better water than the other and was made use of by the inhabitants. (Thanks to Benjamin Poole, Coventry its Histories and Antiquities.)

Brilliant yet again Anne. Any idea whereabouts the original well was?

Sorry Neil, it doesn't say where it was. I don't know if any maps marked the position of wells. Update! I have now found a reference in an 1849 newspaper that says there was a public well near the Dun Cow which was in poor repair. It then says in the report that a public tap from the waterworks main has since been opened.

The pump was in the road, just off the pavement on the south side by the time Troughton sketched that bit. As far as I can gather it was in line with the wall between the building but one to the west of the Dun Cow and the one beyond that. See 1914 City Centre Traffic Plan in old map scans. It has a cross in the road where the pump was. If the pump was over the well the road would have been substantially narrower had it been within the moved property. I'm sure that I've read somewhere that there is a covered well in the modern pavement in Jordan Well which would set it back from where the pump was located. Pumps weren't always situated over the wells they replaced but then there were probably several wells in the area and it may not be the well.

NeilsYard. Question on post 109 - see post 101 and 103!

Wells were built or water was found before the buildings, there was no castle or building built without a water supply, and Coventry had hundreds of them, every three/four houses shared a well. It's almost certain that Jordan Well was built before the road (in an orchard I believe). Then about the 18th century, the rural countryside found that barley made the best malt and best beer, it became the nation's drink, almost every farmhouse and cottage made its own beer. So in the towns, malthouses were built and hundreds of inns all made their own beer, and they all needed water and none more so than round Much Park Street area that had wells. In Coventry the barley market was in the Bull Ring. The Black Bear, later called the Craven Arms Hotel, the vaults owned by Checkitts all were built near that well that became known as Jordan's well (see post 101). All of this became known to me in the fifties, when I read Wuthering Heights - the farmer was always drunk without leaving the farm.

I became interested, because for the first nine years of my life my family's water supply was a well and a hand pump. My aunt, about a quarter of a mile away from where we lived, also had a well - we drank tea there from water from the well when I was small. But the house was flattened by the only bomb that hit Aldermans Green Road. Many years later one of the members of this forum discovered this old well in his back garden, so how strange is that for a story of Coventry wells.

The well situation is complicated by the different phases of the city. Even the castle wasn't the start of Coventry's history. I've read in numerous places that the Red Ditch came before the castle and by tracing the ditches it looks like Coventry may have originally been a burh (personal observation, not fact). A traditional Anglo Saxon fortified town. That would have had the Jordan Well well just outside an early town ditch which ties in with a later stage of development. The east/west Red Ditch looks like it continued east where it came up to a north/south ditch just beyond the chapel on the north side of Gosford Street (roughly under the ring road). Some of the earlier wells are lined with dressed stone, believed to have come from the demolition of St Mary's cathedral, but the actual date of them is difficult to know. Certainly they weren't very common until long after the Jordan Well well was dug or otherwise it wouldn't have been noteworthy. The earliest conduits where most people would have got water (give or take the polluted river). These were perhaps initially fed by underground streams and springs but were later connected to out of town sources like Swanswell.

Once again looking on the newspaper archive for Neil and came across this interesting aerial shot of the new art gallery and museum in 1957. Interesting row of nissan huts.

Been some great finds on FB recently from my friend Cliff Berwick. Jordan Well looking east just post Blitz -

A new one for me. When I started, the Blitz photos were interesting but of no use to me. Now I see details that can be seen in no other source.